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Sunday, 2 May 2010

Daily Telegraph policy areas of importance - leaders

Previous analysis looked at the comments made on the BBC's Have your say discussion forums. For this piece of analysis we will instead use all of the comments made on blog posts on the Daily Telegraph website in the month of April. The analysis of the previous two blog postings will be repeated, so we will show what policy areas are close in context firstly to the party leaders, and then to the political parties themselves. This blog post will focus on the party leaders.

As before it is important to note that the scores are normalised to allow a comparison between leaders to be make more easily. Also the sentiment analysis of each of the policy areas here is not shown, but simply shows what policy areas are discussed in context with the leader/party.

The chart below shows the analysis from the Daily Telegraph where we see that immigration and Europe are discussed much more frequently than in the data from the BBC.

The analysis of Gordon Brown is shown below, where again immigration is a top issue. In contrast with David Cameron however, the economy comes through as a strong policy area.

Finally for the three leaders, let's look at Nick Clegg. It is noticeable that Nick Clegg does not have as many categories as the other two leaders, and again immigration is a strong issue. This probably reflects the importance of the issue to the readers of the Daily Telegraph more than the party leaders themselves.

We can compare the leaders against each other with reference to the chart below. It is interesting to note the areas where each leader has most comments. Notice again that this does not mean that they are good or bad comments - the sentiment analysis of the comments made is not the focus of this particular report.